Chapter 21 Section 3

•1920’s Popular Culture

What is Pop Culture?

Schools and the Media

Enrollment increased from 1914 to 1926

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• Prosperous times led to higher educational standards for industrial job

• Broad arrangement of courses: vocational training in industrial jobs & college prep

Problems teaching Non-English Speaking immigrants

• Taxes used to finance the schools increased

• School costs $2.7 billion a year

Expanding News Coverage

• Education spread literacy

• Growing mass media shaped a culture

Newspapers hook readers with by using sensational stories in tabloids

• Magazines summarized the week’s news

Radio Comes of Age

• Most powerful form of communication

• Wider world opened to America

America’s Leisure

• People had money and time for leisure activities

• Spent $4.5 billion on entertainment

• Crossword puzzles and playing games

What Kind of Games?

• Flagpole Sitting

• Dance Marathons

Sports

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Lindbergh’s Flight

• first nonstop solo flight across Atlantic

• stood for the honesty & bravery

• Paved the way for others

Entertainment and the Arts

• Movies became national pastime • Escape through romance and

comedy• The Jazz Singer was first major

movie with sound • Steamboat Willie first animated

film with sound

• Playwrights and composers of music broke away form European melodramas

• Now, plays reflected upon modern isolationism, confusion, and family conflict

George Gershwin

created new sound when merged traditional elements with American Jazz and created a new sound that was American

• Painters appealed to Americans by Recording an America of realities and dreams

Edward Hopper (loneliness of American life)

• Georgia O’Keefe (grandeur of New York)

Writers

• Richest era of literary history • becoming more critical of

American lifestyles and morals• Many writers chose to live in

Europe • Writers who were in WWI

denounce war

• Sinclair Lewis – first American to win Nobel Prize in literature.

• Characters used to ridicule Americans for conformity and materialism.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald – coined the phrase “Jazz Age”

• Writing revealed negative side of the period’s lavish lifestyles

• Edna St. Vincent Millay – wrote poems celebrating youthful freedom from traditional constraints

• Ernest Hemingway criticized the glorification of war & introduced a simplified style of writing

Summary:

• How did public schools change?–Think immigrants, enrollment,

courses, and financing• What were some of the heroes of

the 1920’s?–Writers, Sports, Movies, etc…

• How was the media or news spread?